Just kidding . . . this weekend, if anything, promises to be very sober and particularly chaste.

My little hiatus from work - this unstructured, 13-day stretch of burning off accrued vacation backlog - is not quite over but the end is in sight. One more weekend, and then back to work.

Generally, I don't do particularly with unstructured time. When not required to be any particular place at any particular time, I tend to become a little disoriented and kind of lazy. Since my last day at work, Monday, December 22, all that has been demanded of me has been to:

1. Show up for a dentist appointment (cleaning) at 11 a.m on Monday (12/29)
2. Open the Zen Center that same Monday night with my newly pearly whites

Pretty short list for 13 days. I also went to the Center on New Year's Eve for our annual end-of-the-year, 108-Gates celebration, but that was a voluntary outing, not a requirement.

So what have I been doing in the meantime? Good question - looking back, I wonder the same myself. I've been staying up late and sleeping in late, catching up on reading (I expect to finally finish The Corrections this weekend), noodling around on my computer, surfing the web, and generally wasting my time. Honestly, I don't know how I would have made it if not for zazen.

No reason to rush to do anything. There were whole days where I never left the house, and others where if it weren't for a trip to the supermarket, I wouldn't have gotten out at all. Today, a rainy, cool, Northwest-Pacific kind of day, my only outing was to go to the bank to deposit my new tenants' January rent check, and driving home I got read-ended in slow traffic (no damage, no injury - it was slow traffic), but that was enough to coop me up for the rest of the day - why risk going out again after that?

Things will start to pick up tomorrow. There's a Saturday zazenkai (all day meditation session) at the Zen Center tomorrow that I plan to attend, as well as Sunday's morning service. I hope to use these events to reprogram my internal body clock back to an early-to-bed, early-to-rise rhythm. Then Monday, it's back to work for a day that promises to be chock full of "catch up" tasks after all my time off.

And of course, as always, Monday night I open the Zen Center. I hope to join the Kennesaw sitting group next Wednesday night - it's been several weeks since I've been there - and on Friday night, there's a screening of the film "Why Has Bodhi-Dharma Left For the East?"

That following Sunday, I'm on schedule to give the dharma talk for the Sunday-morning service at the Zen Center and the next Sunday, it looks like I will be going up to the Chattanooga Center. On top of all that, work may require a day trip to Augusta and a flight up to Boston this month, so I'll certainly be jumping with both feet back into the active life and out of this three-toed-tree-sloth stupor.